Saudi Arabia Information Technology Report

The steep decline in the oil price in 2014 and 2015, and continued uncertainty about the medium-term trajectory, weighs on Saudi Arabia’s economy and the IT market through weaker consumer and enterprise sentiment. There is potential upside from the government’s Vision 2030 initiative to diversify the economy, which includes targets for developing the ICT sector, but we caution that a degree of scepticism is warranted. This is due to the historical failure of many similar attempts at diversification by commodity economies. As a result, we have a subdued growth outlook, but there is nonetheless a modest recovery envisaged from the lows of 2015 in our core scenario. We forecast a CAGR of 3.0% for IT spending throughout the 2016-2020 period.

Latest Updates & Industry Developments
-Computer Hardware Sales: SAR18.3bn in 2016 to SAR17.9bn in 2020. Saturation of the retail PC market and a low-value enterprise mix limit the potential of the computer hardware segment, which will be exacerbated by domestic economic weaknesses.

-Software Sales: SAR8.6bn in 2016 to SAR10.3bn in 2020. Successful economic diversification and/or a recovery in the oil price could raise the software market spending outlook, but even in our core scenario, we expect growth to outperform the hardware segment.

-IT Services Sales: SAR11.9bn in 2016 to SAR15.5bn in 2020. Economic uncertainty has some upside for services where solutions offering cost savings and flexibility to enterprises such as outsourcing, cloud computing and smart services will prove attractive, and potentially have a role in the modernisation of Saudi Arabia’s inefficient public sector.